Empowered or over-powered? The real experiences of local participation in the UK's New Deal for Communities

The notion of ‘participation’ has growing currencyat many levels of social policy in the UK where the Labour governmentuses it to denote the engagement of ‘local people’in decision-making about the services and structures which affecttheir daily lives. In particular, local participation is givenas the distinctive feature of the UK government's flagship initiativefor neighbourhood renewal, the New Deal for Communities, butthere is little known about what this means in practice forthe ‘local’ people it affects.     

New information communication technologies and the development of a children's 'community of interest'

This paper is concerned with the potential of new InformationCommunication Technologies as a means of furthering a children’s‘community of interest’. A ‘community of interest’is taken from Raymond Williams’ concept of people formingcommunities not around place but around specific ‘interests’.I wish in this paper to explore the forms and tensions of achildren’s ‘community of interest’ that mightbe facilitated around ICTs in general and the Internet in particular.The paper draws on community development literature around thepotentials and use of ICTs as a means of developing communities.The paper highlights these potentials but also investigatesthe obstacles that a children’s online ‘communityof interest’ may confront.     

Using a 'domains' approach to build community empowerment

This paper provides two case study examples of how communityempowerment can be better conceptualized, planned and appliedwithin a programme context by using a ‘domains’approach. What is new about this approach is that it does notstart with a blank slate onto which participants inscribe theirown problems or needs but provides a predetermined focus througheach of nine ‘empowerment domains’: Improves participation;Develops local leadership; Increases problem assessment capacities;Enhances the ability to ‘ask why’; Builds empoweringorganizational structures; Improves resource mobilization; Strengthenslinks to other organizations and people; Creates an equitablerelationship with outside agents; and Increases control overprogramme management. The importance to community developmentpractice is that the approach provides a more systematic meansfor community empowerment in a programme context.     

Campaign for education in democratic citizenship, Guadalajara, Mexico

Since the time of the Mexican Revolution that began in 1910(views on when it finished vary between 1917 and 1940) Mexicohad been ruled by the same, single political party, the PRI(the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, meaning the ‘InstitutionalRevolutionary Party’), until it finally lost a presidentialelection in 2000 to the right-wing Party of National Action,after seventy-one years in power. The PRI had stayed in powerthrough a mixture of ‘clientelism’, ‘populism’,‘corruption’ and the rigging of elections and helda tight control on the whole of Mexican society. In its effortsto bring about social change, from the 1990s onwards Mexicansociety began to concentrate its efforts on challenging thedominance held by the PRI at the national, federal level. Adebate on the ‘transition to democracy’ took offin both academic circles and social and civil organizationslooking for ways to create a new and different kind of relationshipbetween government and society. It was in that context that,as with many other civil organizations in Mexico, we in IMDEC¹considered how we might best open up more spaces for the cultureand practice of democracy and motivate citizens to activelycampaign on those issues impacting on their daily lives. Theissue, however, was how to engage this participation differently,in a more festive atmosphere, breaking with formal traditions,in such a way that people would feel better motivated to becomeinvolved in actively addressing the problems that surroundedthem. In this article, I want to share an experience, whichtook place between April and August 1994, before the local electionsof that year, based on a Campaign for Education in DemocraticCitizenship.     

Are We Thinking Straight? The Politics of Straightness in a Lesbian and Gay Social Movement Organization

Daniel Cortese's book, ‘Are we thinking straight: Thepolitics of straightness in a lesbian and gay social movementorganization’ examines the political strategies of theUSA organization, the Straight and Gay Alliance (SAGA), andits efforts to promote ‘safe schools’ for lesbian,gay, bisexual and trans youth (LGBT). The book's main focusis on how SAGA deploys the involvement of ‘straight’or heterosexually-identified individuals as part of SAGA's publicpolitical agenda. As a national organization with numerous localchapters across the United States, SAGA encourages parents,teachers and students to work together to ensure that schoolsactively protect LGBT students from homophobic     

Community-managed water supplies in Africa: sustainable or dispensable?

Over the past two decades, community management has become theprevalent model for management of rural water supplies throughoutsub-Saharan Africa. Despite its widespread popularity amongdonors and implementing agencies, low water supply sustainabilitylevels throughout the sub-continent indicate that it is notthe panacea it is often presented to be. There is a strong needto distinguish between ‘community participation’which is a prerequisite for sustainability and ‘communitymanagement’ which is not. If community management systemsare to be sustainable, they require ongoing support from anoverseeing institution to provide encouragement and motivation,monitoring, participatory planning, capacity building, and specialisttechnical assistance. If such support is not available, alternativessuch as household water supplies and private sector servicedelivery should be considered.     

The Millennium Development Goals: Raising the Resources to Tackle World Poverty

At first glance, this book is about a narrow and technical aspectof today's development agenda – how to raise finance tohelp achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). However,as Tony Addison and George Mavrotas put it in their chapter,‘mobilising finance in the right way can be a tremendousforce for good. The roads that the poor travel down, the marketsthat they access, and the schools that their children attendare all – in one way or another – the products ofdevelopment finance’ (p. 68). Approached in this way,the subject of this book gets to the heart of achieving equitableand sustainable development and, in its 11 chapters, the bookdoes indeed examine     

Legislators of the world

In ‘The Defence of Poetry’ 1821, Shelley claimedthat ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of theworld’. This has been taken to suggest that simply byvirtue of composing verse, they exert some exemplary moral power,in a vague unthreatening way. In fact, in his earlier politicalessay, ‘A Philosophic View of Reform’, he had writtenthat ‘Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged’,etc. The philosophers, he was talking about, were revolutionary-minded:Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Voltaire and Mary Wollstonecraft. In addition, Shelley was, no mistake, out to change the legislationof his time. For him, there was no contradiction between poetry,political philosophy and active     

Looking inside public involvement: how is it made so ineffective and can we change this?

Communities and community groups across Britain are faced withever-increasing opportunities to ‘participate’,yet such engagement is widely viewed as ineffective and themotives behind it viewed with suspicion. This article suggeststhat ineffectiveness is often at least partly the result ofdecisions that are taken within the wider policy-making processesthat develop and surround public involvement, and presents away of analysing such management. This analysis also pointsto a strategy for being more effective, through attempting tobecome more active players in the larger policy-making ‘game’.     

Community development and the politics of community

In a context in which ‘community empowerment’ isvirtually government policy, it is hardly surprising that thereis almost no area of social policy that is immune from the communitytreatment. Of course, this is not new, despite the zeal withwhich each new initiative is ‘rolled out’. In fact,sometimes it seems that policy development needs to reinventthe wheel of community every decade or so. The question, therefore,is what this ideological recycling of community tells us: first,about the meaning of the term itself; second, about its contemporarysignificance within the wider politics of the state. This articleargues that we need to draw on those historical and theoreticalresources which help us to think our way through to the contemporarycontext. Only an active and engaged recognition of the politicsof community will enable us to get to the root of the problematicyet promising nature of community development.     

Editorial

Publication of these conference papers on the theme of communitydevelopment in the ‘new’ Europe comes at a particularlysignificant moment as the people of different ‘old’European nation states     

Assumptions, Motivations and Neutrality in Rural Development: The Portuguese Paradigm

Development agents need to examine their underlying assumptions,motivations, neutrality, and their terminology, which is oftenimprecise and misleading. In addition, development is frequentlycharacterized by self-created dichotomies that obscure the veryproblems that need to be solved. The combined cooperativistand constructivist approach has proved itself successful inovercoming these problems. "A lady once said to him, ‘My maid must be pleased, Igave her my dresses.’ ‘That's nice’, he replied,‘does she give you hers?" Jean-Paul Sarrte, Saint Genet "You name it, you claim it." Max Roach, Black American jazzmusician, referring to whites, and jazz.     

Participation and accountability in corporate community involvement programmes: a research agenda

Corporate community involvement (CCI) is catching up among businessesoperating in developing countries under the wave of corporatesocial responsibility (CSR). Significantly, CCI discourse theworld over is shifting from ‘involvement’ to ‘investment’,the latter advancing the business case. This shifting paradigmdepicts a calculative approach to CCI based on costs and benefits,revealing reciprocal yet unequal corporate–community relationships.This approach when implemented in already disadvantaged communitiesraises fears of exploitation rather than community empowerment.This article critiques the predominant approaches applied inCCI and their implications towards poverty reduction and sustainablecommunity development efforts in developing countries.     

Editorial

The continuing struggle over the meaning and purposes of ‘community’is at the centre of this issue of the Journal. Practitionersand theorists of community development have for some time beencautious about the global resurgence of government interestin the concept and its potential for mobilization in the pursuitof a range of policies, including the re-invigoration of democracy.Typically the concern is the extent to which such policies thatpromote ‘community’ benefit the disadvantaged, excludedand minority groups or whether they signal a withdrawal of publicprovision and government abdication of responsibility for themeeting of basic needs and the incorporation of activists andorganizations concerned with social justice. Alternatively thereare those that continue to see the potential in such inclusivestrategies or those that promote ‘community’ provision     

Raising expectations or dashing hopes?: Well-being and participation in disadvantaged areas

The idea of ‘well-being’ has emerged as a centrallens through which to understand people and places in socialpolicy terms. At the same time, ‘participation’has become central in debates and practices about communitylife in general and neighbourhood renewal in particular. Thisarticle explores the relationship between well-being and participationin disadvantaged areas. Drawing on primary research in two NewDeal for Communities (NDC) areas in the United Kingdom, I explorehow local people's expectations of participation in NDC aredisappointed and how that disappointment may pose a key riskto well-being. I propose, therefore, that experiences of participationin areas of neighbourhood renewal threaten levels of well-beingin the very disadvantaged areas where it is most needed.     

New Labour's appropriation of the concept of community: a critique

This article analyses the ways in which ‘community’,one of the most important yet ill-defined concepts in SocialSciences, has been ‘appropriated’ in the discourseof the UK's New Labour government. It argues that the highlystrategic ways in which the term is used leads to associatedmeanings that neglect the intrinsically complex nature of theconcept and risk essentializing group identities, thus adverselyaffecting the most deprived sections of society.     

Strength Broadsides from Disability on the Arts

This book is a deeply personal treatise connecting experienceto the very tangible social constructs around Dis-Ability. We are writing as what Masefield calls TAP s – temporarilyable people – with experience of working in communitydevelopment and community arts: his own life exemplifies this.Masefield was a respected and successful theatre director andcommunity arts manager when, at forty-four, he developed a debilitatingand devastating myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), which renderedhim speechless and almost immobile. Indeed, one of the mostpowerful parts of the book is where he describes his own transitionfrom able to disabled like ‘trying to run a car on a torchbattery’. A very useful ‘way in’ to all ofthis